Discovering Oslo

A city known for sending people away invites you to come home

May 13, 2001|By Toni Stroud, Tribune staff reporter.

OSLO — There's a challenge to visiting a place whose populace has made a career of leaving home.

Stockholm's a cultural center. Copenhagen's a party town. But Oslo? It's the capital of a nation best known for what its people have done someplace else. Edvard Munch painted "The Scream" in Berlin. Thor Heyerdahl sailed Kon-Tiki through the South Pacific. Sonia Henie skated to gold-medal victories in Switzerland, New York and Germany before becoming an actress in Hollywood. The Vikings went Everywhere Else.

No wonder Oslo's tricky to anticipate.

This city of half a million--they're the ones who stayed home long enough to be counted--is a year-round port situated at the end of a wide fiord . . . overseen by a 197-foot-high ski jump. Its biggest art museum is outdoors in an 80-acre sculpture park . . . while its most famous ships are displayed indoors on dry land. The king lives in a palace cradled by flower-strewn woods in the middle of town. There's a big stone fortress that displays instruments of torture in one building and holds church services in another. And part of the main strolling boulevard is barred to cars . . . so pedestrians need only avoid teenagers pushing aluminum scooters.

For a city that stays up all night in summer, Oslo is clean and quiet. Even the dockside rock concert and fireworks show on Midsummer Night are tame. And there's enough variety of restaurants that you don't have to eat fish three meals a day unless you want to.

This could very well be the most American of European cities. Where else are you going to find a Big Horn Steak House right across the street from a Mamma Leone's, both of which are near a store advertising Wrangler jeans ("Texas" and "Ohio") for $55. Then again, those places are only a block from Domkirke, or Oslo Cathedral, whose pulpit, altar and organ have been there since 1697.

If you're smart or on a budget, you'll take the high-speed train from the airport and hit town two blocks from Domkirke at Oslo Sentral Stasjon, which is how they spell central train station in Norway. If you're rich or retired, you'll arrive by one of the many cruise ships that dock most often right beneath the imposing stone walls of Akershus, a fort-and-castle even older than Domkirke.

Akershus is the sturdy kind of fort you dreamed of as a child: big, broad ramparts that contain a castle, a church and other structures that today house several museums. You could easily spend an entire day prowling its chambers and courtyards.

In fact, Norway's Resistance Museum stands on the fortress grounds, in tribute to those Norwegians who suffered in Nazi prison camps. With exhibits such as leg screws, flails, prison-camp uniforms and even a set of dentures used as a radio receiver, it presents a sobering chronicle of World War II.

But that war is recent history compared to what this castle has witnessed in its 700 years. Why, just one of its rooms, Margrethe Hall (named in 1363 for the Danish queen of King Hakon VI), has served as ladies' apartments, a granary, a reception room and an armory--when it wasn't engulfed in the kind of fires that beset many buildings in the old days. The walls of this room are so thick that the window sills are fitted with sky-blue seat cushions, and from that vantage point you can see the harbors (Oslo has more than one) and a good part of town.

Across the harbor from Akershus is Aker Brygge, an up-and-coming shopping and dining district along the lines of Chicago's Navy Pier.

That somber, red-brick hulk facing the waterfront is the Radhuset, or City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded. Facing City Hall are the piers where fishermen sell the day's catch, and you can take the 10-minute ferry to the Bygdoy Peninsula and the boat museums.

Norwegians have had the sea in their blood for more than 2,000 years. According to the Viking Ship Museum, Norse ship building dates to the 4th Century B.C.; and the museum displays a tapestry of ship builders helping William the Conqueror prepare to invade England in 1066. The Viking Age lasted 800-1050 A.D., when those famous Norwegians left home in vessels like the three in the Viking Ship Museum.

These boats, graceful as swans, were all excavated from blue-clay burial mounds in the Oslofjord area. No one knows when they were plundered of their gold and silver, but what the grave-robbers left behind was treasure enough.

Funeral ships

The 72-foot-long Oseberg ship, the most elegant and best-preserved of the three, was built as a pleasure boat, probably between 815 and 820 A.D. It was a Viking custom to bury their dead in ships, once the ships had outlasted their usefulness. When the Oseberg ship was excavated in 1904, it was determined that it had held the remains of a woman of high rank, possibly even royalty, and another woman who perhaps was her attendant.